Hiring a car at Stansted airport now means being fingerprinted like a criminal.
Hiring a car can now mean leaving a fingerprint. And check-out staff are scanning the customers as well as the shopping. Biometrics are entering every day life.
Getting your fingerprints taken would once have meant only one thing. You were helping the police with their inquiries. Now such “biometric” identification is entering the mainstream of every day life.
If you want to hire a car at Stansted Airport, you now need to give a fingerprint.
The scheme being tested by Essex police and car hire firms, is not voluntary. Every car rental customer must take part.
Fine. But it is erroneous to state that there is no choice involved. We all have a choice. Mine is to tell the car hire companies operating out of Stansted exactly what they can do with their cars.
“It’s not intrusive really. It’s different – and people need to adjust to it. It’s not Big Brother, it’s about protecting people’s identities. The police will never see these thumbprints unless a crime is committed.”
Of course it’s fucking intrusive! Normal, law abiding citizens are being treated like criminals because the police are too inept and lazy to use proper policing methods to deal with the perpetrators of crime. Punishing everybody is easier for them. Notice the “protecting people’s identities” newspeak bollocks. Here we go again; the slow of wit using Blairite banalities to justify yet another erosion of our liberties.
But it hasn’t been well received by all customers. Ciaran Moore from Belfast was “astounded” when he was asked for his fingerprint. He thought the staff were joking.
Making fingerprints compulsory, he says, is “disproportionate” and he has written to complain.
“Disproportionate” is an understatement. Along with writing to complain, perhaps Mr Moore should have told them where to stick it, taken the train and hired a car elsewhere. That’s what I would do.
I wonder what will happen when someone finds a way of replacing a normal fingerprint with some artificial replacement, perhaps by coating the fingers with a transparent material then embossing a print into that?
Hey presto, the system is circumvented in one easy step and because fingerprints are so secure the car hire staff will likely have ceased using most of the other more effective security measures before long.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: biometric tests make assumptions such as the biometric being unique, unforge-able and always useful. None of these assumptions are correct. I foresee trouble ahead as security firms painfully re-learn the lessons of the past.